Method for doing business with collision centers

ABSTRACT

A method and system for the supply of automotive collision centers is provided, which includes a Customer, Jobber, and intermediate Order Manager. The Customer will fax, phone, email and most importantly e-Commerce the order to the Order Manager, who passes it on to the Jobber. Then the Order Manager will in turn fax, call, email and send over the Internet and/or intranet the order to a jobber who is local Order Manager Affiliate. Under one particularly important part of the invention, orders are scanned at the customer&#39;s physical location, passed through the Order Manager&#39;s system, and entered directly into the legacy system of the jobber, saving a great deal of time and effort.

CROSS-REFERENCE TO RELATED APPLICATIONS

The present application claims priority to pending provisional patentapplication No. 60/161,127 filed Oct. 22, 1999, entitled “Method ofDoing Business with Collision Centers”.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention generally relates to methods of doing businesswith automotive “collision centers”, otherwise known as “body shops”.

BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION

It is well known for “jobbers” to provide “collision centers” (a.k.a.body shops) with supplies, such as paint, sandpaper, tape, etc.Typically the ordering process is as follows. The jobber (which can bean independent or a company owned store) receives the order from thecollision center (a.k.a. “customer”) by phone or fax, fills the orderand delivers the order to the customer.

Discussion will now be made about the particular products involved andwhy they tend not to be sold any other way than ordered through localjobbers at the local level. The products under discussion are heavy,hazardous and flammable. After being sold, the unused portions becomehazardous waste. Because of shipping charges and government regulations,to date it has been unrealistic to sell outside one's local area. Sothat made internet selling not very appealing.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The invention overcomes deficiencies in the art by providing a methodand system for the supply of automotive collision centers is provided,which includes a Customer, Jobber, and intermediate Order Manager. TheCustomer will fax, phone, email and most importantly e-Commerce theorder to the Order Manager, who passes it on to the Jobber. Then theOrder Manager will in turn fax, call, email and send over the Internetand/or intranet the order to a jobber who is local Order ManagerAffiliate. Under one particularly important part of the invention,orders are scanned at the customer's physical location, passed throughthe Order Manager's internet-based system, and entered directly into thelegacy computer system of the jobber, saving a great deal of time andeffort.

Generally described, the present invention provides a method forproviding supplies to an automotive Collision Center from a Supplierhaving a legacy computer system, the method comprising the steps of a)establishing an internet web site, the web site supervised by an OrderManager and including subsections assigned to a plurality of Suppliers,each Supplier including unique SKU numbers associated with theinventories of the Suppliers, b) providing scannable indicia on the binsof the Collision Center, the scannable indicia corresponding to the SKUnumbers, c) providing a scanner and associated hardware at the locationof the Collision Center, the scanner and associated hardware configureto allow one to scan the indicia on the bins and to transfer orderinformation associated with the goods intended for the bins to theinternet web site; and d) providing a connection between the internetweb site and the legacy system of the Jobber to allow the orderspreviously scanned to be entered directly into the legacy system fromthe web site.

Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide animproved method and system of using same for processing orders forproviding supplies to an automotive collision center.

Therefore it is an object of the present invention to provide animproved method and system of using same for processing orders forproviding supplies to an automotive collision center from a supplier.

It is a further object of the present invention to provide an improvedmethod and system of using same for processing orders for providingsupplies to an automotive collision center from a supplier having alegacy computer system.

Other objects, features, and advantages of the present invention willbecome apparent upon reading the following detailed description of thepreferred embodiment of the invention when taken in conjunction with thedrawing and the appended claims.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

Having thus described the invention in general terms, reference will nowbe made to the accompanying drawings, which are not necessarily drawn toscale.

FIG. 1 is an illustrative view showing the relationship between anexemplary Jobber, and exemplary Customer, and the Order Manager.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF THE INVENTION

The present invention now will be described more fully hereinafter withreference to the accompanying drawings, in which preferred embodimentsof the invention are shown. This invention may, however, be embodied inmany different forms and should not be construed as limited to theembodiments set forth herein; rather, these embodiments are provided sothat this disclosure will be thorough and complete, and will fullyconvey the scope of the invention to those skilled in the art. Likenumbers refer to like elements throughout.

General Operation

As noted above, the present invention, an “order taking system” knownpresently under the trademark “SupplyLine”, referenced genericallyherein as “Order Manager” sets forth a new way of doing business for ourindustry.

With SupplyLine, in force it will go like this. The customer (at 20)will fax, phone, email and most importantly e-Commerce the order to thesystem 10 of the Order Manager, who passes it on to the jobber. Then theOrder Manager will in turn fax, call, email and send over the Internetand/or intranet the order to a jobber who is local SupplyLineAffiliate(generically also referenced as an Order Manager Affiliate orJobber 30). Under one particularly important part of the invention,orders are scanned at the customer's site, passes through the OrderManager's system, and enter directly into the legacy system of thejobber, saving a great deal of time and effort.

More Detailed Operation

The Order Manager at 10 according to the present invention is not justan internet store. It's a new method of how to do business withcollision centers. It is a web site with the full catalog offering ofthe local jobber that serves the collision center in their local area.The site does much more than orders products. Applicant will now attemptto take you through the entire process. This is in the order that eventswould unfold.

1. The local jobber 30 signs up with Order Manager (a.k.a “SupplyLine™”)to be an Order Manager Affiliate of SupplyLine. This is done eitheronline or over the phone or in person. By being a Order ManagerAffiliate the jobber gives up none of his rights as a local businessman.He is just now a member of an Affiliate group designed to better servehis collision customers.

2. After sign up is complete, the Jobber would provide for Order Managerthe SKUs that the jobber carries in his inventory. This is given toOrder Manager in any type file that the Jobber can provide through theJobber's particular legacy system. Once the item file is provided toOrder Manager, Order Manager loads the items, prices and sku's for theJobber and helps the Jobber establish the catalog the Jobber will beoffering. This is set up on a web site that is hosted by the OrderManager, although as noted below the Jobber will be able to limitedaccess and editing capabilities to the a portion of the web siteassigned to the Jobber. This gives the Jobber his “own web site”, whichincludes the jobber's catalog from which customers can order if desired.

3. Order Manager then trains the Jobber how to upload new catalogofferings the Jobber may want to make available to the Jobber'scustomers on the Jobber's “mini”-web site. This training also includestraining on the mini-web site for the Jobber's store that the Jobber cancustomize to fit the Jobber's needs.

4. Once the Jobber's web site at 10 is established and catalogs inplace, the Jobber is ready to start setting up the Jobber's assignedshops, i.e., the Jobber's particular Customers. First the Jobberbarcodes the bins in the Customer's shop at 20 to reflect the items thatthe Customer's shop uses on a regular basis. After the bar coding iscomplete, the internal workings of the site can be set up further. Bythis is meant the shop is ready to establish who can buy what, when andunder what budget restraints.

5. The orders are placed from the customer to the web site overseen bythe in a multitude of ways. One way is that the collision shop goesdirectly to the site and orders. He would use the search catalogfunction or he could use the quick order form or the standard item formto get his items selected from the site. Once he has selected the itemsand department they are being ordered for, he selects “place order” andaway the order goes.

6. An alternate ordering technique is as follows. In this case, thejobber has provided the collision shop with their own automated entrydevice such as a scanner 25 or the jobber may come to the shop and placethe orders for him, either way a scanner or other automated entry deviceis involved. An off-the-shelf program is the used as known in the art toread the barcodes on the bins, and enter the order into the scanner. Theorder is then passed to the web by use of a computer and a personaldigital assistant (PDA) having a scanner cradle (holder) to link it intothe web, a cell phone and portable modem to get the order to the serveron the web, or other means known in the art. It is recognized that thescanner device will change and so will the technology to send it to theserver in the coming years. We are currently using the PALM™ Scannerfrom Symbol™, but this is cited as an example only and should not beconstrued as limiting.

7. Suppose we now have gotten the order to the web, that does not meanthat the order has been placed into the Jobber's system. However, underthe present invention the jobber has the option of having his orderscome from the server by fax, email, EDI or directly inputted into hislegacy system at his jobber location. Under the last version, the jobberhas NO data entry to do at all. The scanner in the shop, or the personordering from the web, did all the data entry that was needed, andsoftware such as known in the art is configured to allow direct entryfrom the web to the Jobber's computer system. This is done by processessuch as known in the art, but one process is by use of an FTPapplication which downloads a file into the jobber' legacy system at 30once per minute. The jobber can be given a password to accomplish this.While on this subject, the customer can also access his orderinformation via the web by use of suitable password access.

The order coming into the legacy systems is an important part of theinvention. Orders flow directly from the scanner at the shop level,through the Order Manager's web site, to the jobbers own computersystem. The order can appear on the machine in a variety on ways, butmostly it would appear in the form of a pick ticket or a special orderuntil it was verified and picked. Once that was complete, the order canbe changed by definition into an invoice. Again note the inventiveconcept of using bar codes and scanners coupled with comprehensivemanagement features designed to facilitate the procurement process withas little human input as possible.

8. Now on to the site's management features.

Set Up Purchase Order Standards

The shop can decide if they want to set up purchase orders in severaldifferent ways. (a). The purchase orders can be automatically numberedeither company wide or by department. Each department can have their ownprefix or the shop can have just one prefix. (b). Blanket PO's thatcover all purchases for a given period or all year. (c). No PO's. (d).As discussed before, the PO's can have any prefix the jobber or shopdecides for any and all departments.

Budget Standards

This is a section where the shop decides what period to have forreporting.

Month, Quarter, or Year

Departments—The jobber or shop sets up departments within the collisionshop. This might be the paint shop or metal shop; detail or new car getready. The idea is to set up as many departments as needed to allow theshop to track their supplies. Once the shop has set these departmentsup, they assign a budget amount to that department that the buyers andmanagers will be allowed to purchase within the given period.

Buyers and Managers—This function allows the shop manager to assigndifferent levels of entry to the system. Buyers are allowed to use thesystem to purchase, but their orders must be reviewed by managementbefore the order will be placed on the site and sent to the jobber.Managers can approve their own orders or not, depending on what theupper shop management decides. An example might be that a painter couldapprove his orders for the paint shop, but not the detail department.

Create Standard Orders—The shop or jobber can set up the every dayorders that the shop normally orders a lot of. An example might be TINTSfor the mixing machine, or CLEARS and HARDNERS that the shop uses everyday. The idea is that any supplies that are used day in and day outcould have a standard order built for those supplies.

View and Approve orders created by your buyers—This is where uppermanagement processes the buyer's orders. Management can approve ormodify the order or simply deny the order. The order is shown item byitem, so if just some of the items need to be modified that can be donequickly.

Usage Reports—This allows management to see exactly what has beenordered. Date, P.O. number, manufacture, or product codes are some ofthe ways that the jobber or shop can view their usage report.

Budget Reports—This section gives the percentage of the differentdepartments that has been used in a given period. So it might saysomething like this: paint shop 78% of budget. Giving management a quickthumb nail idea of where each department is on their purchases for agiven period.

Order Status Report—The shop comes to this screen to see each order init's entirety as to what has been ordered in each given period. This ishelpful in seeing who has ordered what when.

Advantages

The invention noted above allows manufactures the opportunity to sell ona national level through existing jobbers, but still offer local serviceby use of the jobbers, which would not be possible if the manufacturerssold the materials directly via the internet, for example. SupplyLineAffiliates will be all over the nation and the rest of the worldsupplying the collision centers with their minute to minute supplies aswell as weekly and monthly supply orders. However, it should be notedthat the only reason SupplyLine would get involved in the daily callsfrom a collision center is if it was a national player and they neededsome help with ordering. However, most of this will be automaticallydone through the web site and the PALM-type devices.

What the manufactures get out of this is the ability to go to huge usersand offer them big deals. Normally when big deals are cut with nationalplayers, the people at the shop level suffer for loss of service. Theidea under the present invention lets the technician in the shop enjoythe same level of service that he has always had.

Said another way, this new method of distribution will allow a bigmanufacturing company (hereinafter “Big Manufacturer”) to sell theirproducts to a collision shop on a national and regional basis and stillhave the current jobber stores deliver and bill the goods and services.Big Manufacturer may elect to even carry the receivables of all theproducts being sold as well as theirs. This is a huge point because BigManufacturer may only sell paint. There are hundreds of other productsthat a collision shop uses. Big Manufacturer has to date only been ableto cause their products to be used. SUPPLYLINE Jobbers will be able tooffer to the shops that the manufacture a way to service the collisioncenter with the paint that the shop uses as well as all the other itemsthat they don't sell. For example Dupont sells paint and only paint. Theshops need many other items including sandpaper, tape and glue. Thejobber will be there with all the supplies that a shop needs, not justpaint. Big company can not offer local service and all the otherproducts that a shop needs. After all they are a manufacture, not asupplier of products.

We think that this new way of doing business will bring radical changein our industry. Business has not been done this way in our industry andto applicant's knowledge over the Internet at all. For example, when youorder a book from Barnes and Noble, they don't send the order to thelocal store to be hand delivered to the buyer. No, they send the orderdirect to the customer. Same way with GAP clothes, if you order an itemover their web site it gets shipped direct to you. Not so with thepresent invention. The sale goes from the customer to SupplyLineUSA.comCompany,(mostly web activity) back to the local distributor then to thecustomer. In every aspect of business, the order goes form the seller tothe purchaser with no stops in between. In our industry, because of thehazardous nature of our products, the normal mode of business does notapply. Back to our idea, this allows the Manufacture to sell to a localcompany but still service that local company with the local distributionchain already in place.

Even in situations where the manufacture has company owned stores,business is not done the way we are doing business. BigCompany(MANUFACTURE) makes a deal with the customer (collision center),and then customer orders Big Company's products with SupplyLine thenSupplyLine sends the order back to the local jobber to be filled. Thisallows Big Company to still make deals with large collision centers andnational accounts, but it allows the accounts to be serviced at thelocal level.

Conclusion

In closing, it may be seen that the applicant has developed the conceptof providing supply chain management through scanners and barcodes andthe management features of the site. Further inventions of the applicantrelate to sending the orders from the collision center to the site andon to the jobbers legacy system. While scanners and barcodes are notnew, using them to control another companies inventory is believed to benew. This is a big answer to the shrinking work force in the automotiveindustry.

Many modifications and other embodiments of the invention will come tomind to one skilled in the art to which this invention pertains havingthe benefit of the teachings presented in the foregoing descriptions andthe associated drawings. Therefore, it is to be understood that theinvention is not to be limited to the specific embodiments disclosed andthat modifications and other embodiments are intended to be includedwithin the scope of the appended claims. Although specific terms areemployed herein, they are used in a generic and descriptive sense onlyand not for purposes of limitation.

That which is claimed:
 1. A method for providing supplies to anautomotive Collision Center from a Supplier having a legacy computersystem, said Collision Center having bins, said method comprising thesteps of: establishing an internet web site, said web site supervised byan Order Manager and including subsections assigned to a plurality ofSuppliers, each Supplier including unique SKU numbers associated withthe inventories of said Suppliers; providing scannable indicia on saidbins of said Collision Center, said scannable indicia corresponding tosaid SKU numbers; providing a scanner and associated hardware at thelocation of said Collision Center, said scanner and associated hardwareconfigure to allow one to scan said indicia on said bins and to transferorder information associated with said goods intended for said bins tosaid internet web site; and providing a connection between said internetweb site and said legacy system of said Supplier to allow said orderspreviously scanned to be entered directly into said legacy system fromsaid web site.
 2. The method as claimed in claim 1, wherein saidscannable indicia is a bar code.
 3. The method as claimed in claim 1,wherein said scannable indicia is scanned by hardware associated with apersonal digital assistant, and then said personal digital assistant isused to transmit orders associated with said indicia into a computerwhich is itself connected to the internet.
 4. The method as claimed inclaim 2, wherein said scannable indicia is scanned by hardwareassociated with a personal digital assistant, and then said personaldigital assistant is used to transmit orders associated with saidindicia into a computer which is itself connected to the internet.